Nathan Frank's Blog

Well, obviously, the once-a-week plan fell apart. What it came down to is that as I got to the end of each week, I realized I didn’t really have anything useful to say. I guess part of this effort was supposed to be journaling what happened, but weeks of “I didn’t really get much done.” Or “I finished a scene!” seemed boring or narcissistic or both, so I haven’t written a post.

This week, however (well, last week, I guess. My last four or five Saturdays have been filled with trying to get a set of old metal patio furniture stripped and repainted, so my opportunities for progress have been limited), I finished up going through most of the process laid out in the book Blueprinting Your Bestseller, by Stuart Horwitz.

I say “most” because I had already gone through several iterations of thinking through my story and while I hadn’t done anything as formal as what is laid out in BYB, I had already addressed some of the issues that the BYB process is designed to highlight. For example, when it suggested cutting scenes that don’t really match up to your theme, I had already planned on cutting a couple of scenes that would probably have been flagged in that step.

One early problem I had, and this is me not having had a lot of outside feedback on how to talk about the narrative components of writing, was how BYB defines “scene.” When I first went through the process of identifying my scenes with what I thought was the book’s definition, I ended up with almost 200 scenes. A number that seemed a bit unwieldy, in light of later steps in the process where you are having to track story threads (“scenes”) through every scene and another step where you place cards representing each scene physically on a target.

This led me to step back a bit and decide that, outside of needing to communicate with someone else about any of it, I should be using the definition of scene that seems to be the most helpful for analyzing the story. This led me first to the definition of a scene as a portion of the story that has an arc. Thus, a scene should have some setup, it should then build toward a climax and then there should be some aftermath. This seemed to work pretty well for most scenes, but there were a few conversation-heavy scenes that I felt like were separate scenes but didn’t really seem to have an arc (maybe I just haven’t trained my literary eye enough yet, or maybe I’m writing bad conversation scenes :). So, for conversation scenes, I defined them as a portion of the story where characters come together, each hoping to achieve some (likely contradictory) goal, the goals are denied and then there is some reflection. Those two definitions taken together got me to 70 scenes, which seemed a lot more workable.

All of the above made me wish I had been in a class taught by Horwitz where I could show him something I was considering a scene in my book and ask, “is this what you are meaning?”, but I think I got to a useful place nonetheless.

The process of identifying series and then working those into a short blurb about the story and then ultimately into a single sentence theme was probably the most interesting steps and something I spun on for a while. I had always had in mind that the story had an intertwining of a search for community and then being a protector of that community, but it hadn’t been anything formal and I know there were times where the characters had muddied the message. Now that I’ve formally identified something I like as a theme, I know I’ll be able to do a better job keeping things aligned with that as I move through the next revision. 

Overall, I would say the experience was very positive and I plan on going through a lot of the BYB steps when I swing back to start the first revision of my second book. The second book is in that first draft state that BYB expects, so I’m sure I will get even more value out of the process than I did this time. 

When I started writing a couple of Octobers ago, I think my expectations were low. As I said in my previous post, I had tried to write before and the efforts had always fizzled, so how was this time going to be any different? I still don’t really have an answer as to why it was different. I had read about some authors who had been successful with self-publishing, so maybe the whole effort felt more doable? Maybe I had read enough books and had enough life experience that the stories finally started gelling? Whatever the reason, as the length of time that I had been writing daily stretched from days to weeks and then to months, there was no question that I was now writing and seemed to want to keep doing it.

There was a point where I was a little worried that maybe the spell would be broken. Over Christmas 2022, I talked to my brother about the story in my initial effort and I was disappointed to realize that it was not salvageable. At least by me. Having to throw away the story and characters I had created felt daunting at the time. However, after the holiday, I did just that, started again and kept going. My second effort is still far from where it needs to be, but it is a significant improvement from that first one.

As I moved through 2023, my thoughts changed from wondering whether I could write a complete story to what if I could write something worth publishing. Being an author had always seemed like something other people did, but the thought that I might be able to be one of those people excited me in a way few things have. I knew I was a long way from there now though, so I started looking for ways to improve.

My first stop was Brandon McNulty’s videos (link). Ever since taking one too many English literary criticism classes, I’ve deconstructed the stories I’ve read and watched, but McNulty showed me a way of looking at stories at a granularity that I had missed on my own. Characters and scenes and dialogue were now individual things that needed to be looked at individually to make sure they were serving the purposes of the story. The concept reminded me a bit of Poe’s unity of effect, but on a grander, and at the same time smaller scale.

Over the summer of 2023, I also went through Brandon Sanderson’s videos of his 2020 Creative Writing class (link). That all of those are available for free on YouTube is just an incredible resource. Now that I was developing an eye for it, I saw that there were many things I needed to be doing as an author that I just wasn’t. There were a few things I was, which was heartening, but more that I wasn’t. I also hadn’t thought about any part of the process past the actual writing part. Marketing, submitting, working with editors, publishers, they were all things that hadn’t even been on my radar. I didn’t have, and still don’t, any sense of how long it would take to become a published author, but I could feel the road lengthening as I listened. Publishing is still my ultimate goal, but I’ve accepted that it might be years away and that it might never happen. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.

One thing that Sanderson goes through in his videos is the gardener-architect author spectrum and his personal writing process, which tends towards the architect end. While I can see the benefit of his process, so far, I have found myself more of a gardener. When I think about it, it makes sense. I’ve been a software developer for almost 30 years at this point, and my approach has always been to keep coming at a problem until I find the solution or structure that feels right. I used to call it “finding the solution with some finesse.” There are definite downsides to this approach. First, it probably involves more rework than if I started with a more structured initial vision. It also starts to break down when trying to tackle enterprise-level software problems; there’s so much complexity that just looking for a “solution with some finesse” isn’t going to cut it. Both seem to have similar problems in writing. For coding, 30 years of experience means my intuition has had enough training to be decent at pointing me down the right track. While I hopefully will still be writing in 30 years, I’m trying to find ways to manage these problems before that.

One of the ways that I’m hopeful works do that is the process I’m currently using for the first draft of my second novel. The first time through the story, I just let things flow. I created the characters I needed, had them interact with each other in ways that seemed interesting at the time and let the plot move to a conclusion. Then I took a step back, thought through what I liked, what I didn’t, and where I needed to shore things up. After going through that and mapping out some arcs for the story and characters, I’m going back through, writing what I’m considering the “official” first draft. So far, it seems to be a positive experience.

I know I still have a long road ahead of me and that I’m going to need more than a few (no matter how good) videos to get me where I want to be as author, but for now I’m going to just keep writing.

Growing up, my family watched a lot of sci-fi shows. Star Trek (TNG, DS9 and Voyager), Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Sliders, Seaquest (he did finally get a bigger boat!), were all regularly on the viewing docket. At some point along the line, my love for other people’s stories turned into a desire to tell my own and I started making up stories in my own sci-fi universe. It was generally just a way to interact with the other sci-fi universes I loved, so the stories were almost always about the Galactic Union in my universe doing things with other universes. Thus the Galactic Union had run-ins with the Goa’uld, their ships were attacked by Shadow Ships, and they had contact with the Klingons. They had ships that looked reminiscent of Romulan ships, had border disputes with the Centauri, and they encountered the Dominion. The stories were mostly just ways to busy my mind if I was doing something monotonous, and I never wrote any of them down.

The only time the stories did come out my own imagination is when I told some of them to my brothers. However, those sessions turned out to be less about the story I had come up with and more about us taking turns making up reasons why our preferred galactic nation would win (“You have stronger phasers than us? Well we have Veeter shields!”). It was still fun, even if it tended not to be about my stories.

As we all got older, the storytelling eventually stopped being a thing we did together, but the stories themselves never really stopped for me. For a long time, they weren’t something I told to others or tried to write down, and they were mostly just snippets. Eventually, I did try to put pen to paper and write some of them out, but the few times I did, it never really lasted very long.

Until October 2022. For some reason, this time when I started writing, I didn’t stop. In fact, by the end of the year, I had written almost 75K words and had something with a beginning, a middle and an end. I was hooked.

Those first 75K words were, unfortunately, an unworkable mess. So I started again, this time writing through most of 2023 and hitting 220K words. The new story still had significant issues, but it felt close enough to the real thing that I started considering that maybe I wanted this to be more than just a hobby.

Which leads to the point of why I’m resurrecting my blog. First, I want to try out a different type of writing. Writing about my own thoughts and actions will hopefully help me get better at writing about the thoughts and actions of my characters. Second, I’m planning on self-publishing when I get to that point and being a complete unknown doesn’t seem like a good way to be successful at that. Maybe someday I’ll feel up to starting a Youtube channel, but for now, I’m just going to start blogging on a regular basis.

The other thing that I plan on doing on the “marketing” front is publishing short stories from time to time here. My hope is that small windows into the universe I’ve created will generate interest for the novels when they hopefully/eventually are ready.

So far, writing has been immensely enjoyable, and I’m hoping the next few years of trying to get to the point where I publish continue that trend. One of my mother’s favorite saying is, “you either have a good time or a good story,” but in my case, I’m hoping to have both. No matter what happens though, I’ll be blogging about it here.